The terrible negotiator
Posted by l008com@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 49 comments
This story happened long, long ago. Probably more than 15 years. I'm an independent Mac consultant. Meaning people google me up, email me and I show up at your house to fix your Mac problems. Now adays its all email but back in the day, most people would call me.
So I get a call from this lady. Sometimes they just wanted to schedule an appointment, sometimes they wanted to talk it out for an hour first. This lady had a million questions, we went back and forth for an hour. Everything seemed to go well, she seemed happy and ... normal. No red flags. She left it with something along the lines of "ok let me think this all over and get back to you". Which was fine with me.
At that point in time, I think my hourly rate was $65/hr. So I get a voicemail from this lady a few days later. She no longer seemed 'normal'. Her tone was very angry/annoyed. Her message basically said that she's interested in hiring me to help her, but she's a nurse and she only makes $40/hr, so she doesn't see why she should pay me any more than that. So if I'm willing to work for $40/hr, call her back.
She did not get a call back.
Better to find out they're crazy before you're at their house already doing work that you may or may not be getting paid for!
Flat-Distance-2194@reddit
I used to be the area manager for engineering for a dozen or so Datacentres. Early on I started getting calls late at night to assist staff etc with site issues. No problem until I put in my timesheet. 4hrs call-out fee for answering the phone and solving the problem. If I had to attend site, the first 1/2 hr was included after which it was double time. Client hit the roof until I asked how much did it cost them in downtime? If they waited until morning, how many clients would that piss off? I got my fees. Knowledge has its own worth and I made sure to spend any free time at work studying equipment manuals. In a similar vein, I always fill my car up at my local petrol station. Even though I could find it cheaper a few miles away. My kids asked why I bothered, my reply? If we run out of milk etc at 11pm, who’s open locally? The petrol station. He gets my support purely because he’s convenient and doesn’t rob you blind with the “small trader tax”. Because he’s open 24/7 he was the go to for the first tank of petrol before the drive up country to get my wife to her dying brother. Left at 9.30pm arrived at 4.30am and yes I broke every speed limit to get there just in time.
NotTheOnlyGamer@reddit
I don't pay people more than my hourly wage either, so I get the logic here.
I need my money for other things - crucial bills and other costs; computer repair is a nicety. Given the situation, I'd rather pay ~$200 for a laptop that'll work for several years. Now obviously, being in the Mac space, you're looking at higher machine costs, but maybe this was enough to get the woman to move to Windows or Linux.
noodlyman@reddit
And that after you've already given her an hour on the phone for free.
I had call once for something that sounded potentially simple, I can't remember what. I ran through the usual basics that I'm happy to do for free over the phone: power cycle, reinstall the software if within user's abilities,or whatever the issue was.
Next I offered to visit them, which was waved off. After a few more minutes free advice I was more insistent that I would need to pay them a visit to fix it.
I asked their address to see how far they were. They were 150 miles away.
Why, I asked, did you call me when I'm 150 miles away?
Oh, he replied, I tried someone closer but they wouldn't help me for free over the phone.
Ok, so I'm just a free remote telephone support service. Happily this is fairly uncommon. Most people who get free basic suggestions turn into trusting customers, if the power cycle didn't fix it.
SavvySillybug@reddit
My mom used to run a fancy clothes store ~10 years ago.
She had regulars who would come in, pick out clothes, try them on, and then put them back "to think about it".
And then next time come in wearing clothes they tried on at the store but then bought online. From a competitor selling the same fancy brands. But for cheaper because they don't have physical locations with employees that help you pick everything out and try it on. :/
Jboyes@reddit
I overheard a person in our store mention to their friend they could buy a $20 item "for a dollar less" on Amazon.
Laughing_Luna@reddit
Buh... Shipping and Handling isn't free unless you have amazon prime AND exceed a certain cost threshold. Saving a penny by stepping over a dollar there.
Not to mention that not only do you end up paying about the same, if not more, you have to wait at least a day, usually 2 or more!
I have to imagine that you're not US based, because why else would anyone just trust the price on the tag with no thought to sales tax and S&H.
joule_thief@reddit
Or. If you don't have Prime, it's $35 for free shipping or at least is in my experience.
SavvySillybug@reddit
Incredible.
I would definitely not bother if online wasn't at least 20% cheaper.
Jboyes@reddit
His friend said "I don't care if it was half the price. I'm buying it here because I'm supporting a local business."
I gave him the employee discount. LOL
NotYourNanny@reddit
I shop on Amazon far more than I'd like, because they have things I just can't find locally. I really wish it were otherwise.
thgreatn@reddit
I believe that this should, without question, be the normal procedure. As an employee of a business, you hear a potential customer directly advocate to another potential customer reasons for spending money with your business, reward that person somehow, someway.
SavvySillybug@reddit
Good :)
If I'm buying something actually pricey like computer components I'll look online to make sure I'm getting the best deal. I'm not spending 600 bucks on a graphics card if I could be spending 500.
A $20 item? Store, every time.
Photodan24@reddit
When I was younger, I worked doing sales and repair in a camera shop. People would do the same thing to us. We'd spend a half hour selling them on a particular camera then they'd go buy it at a cheaper Bix Box store.
Here's the kicker though...
They would then bring it in to us and ask us to explain how it worked. FOR FREE. I loved those because we were allowed to call them on their bad behavior and kick them out of the shop.
CamGoldenGun@reddit
"Absolutely, would love to help you out with that. I'll need to see a receipt though."
Photodan24@reddit
Naah, we didn't even have to be that nice. These idiots would literally come in the next day, so we had no trouble recognizing them.
CamGoldenGun@reddit
if she was smart and it was receipt-based, she'd buy one off the shelf, get you to help her and she turn around and return it.
SavvySillybug@reddit
Incredible entitlement.
I'm not above ordering stuff online when it's available locally, but I'd never even consider going into a store I didn't buy from and expecting free help with my thing.
One time my glasses were broken - tiny screw fell out and got lost - and I walked into the nearest eye store to ask for help. It was just a single screw and they were happy to give me a replacement and install it for me. I had bought the glasses from their competitor and asked them how much I owed them for the repair. Even if it was just a tiny screw and a minute of labor, I didn't think they'd just do that for free. But they did! I thanked them so much.
Tight_Syllabub9423@reddit
First time that happened to me, I was working overseas and visiting a different city to where I was working. Screw falls out of glasses, find optometrists, explain problem. No charge, and frankly they were astonished that I'd expect to pay.
A few years ago, same problem, went to my regular optician who offer free adjustments and care for the life of the glasses.
First she decided that my glasses had to go into cleaning solution before any work could be done.
Then she charged me $20 for the clean and quoted me something like an extra $35 for the screw.
I left without the screw and changed optician.
KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit
Maplins has entered the chat
harrywwc@reddit
had a similar situation, although "in person".
back in the early '00s I was working part time, and was looking for something to fill in a bit of time some days. I was talking with a mate of mine who had opened a PC-shop a few years earlier, and he asked if I'd be happy to do a couple of hours a few days a week so he could have a break. "sure" I responded.
so, one day, I'm in the shop alone, some guy wanders in with a sheet listing the specs of a custom pc - easy peasy, it's one of the things we did. So I entered the specs into the quote software and came up with a number.
and he said "I can get it $50 cheaper at." so I double-checked the numbers said, "sorry, that's the best we can do. I guess you should go to and get your pc there." he grumped, but left.
a few months later, a somewhat familiar face lugs in a PC "it's broken, I want it fixed under warranty." so I look at the case and I'm immediately sus, no shop-serial number sticker on the back and no shop-badge on the front, but, you never know... I ask his details to look him up, and find mr "I can get it cheaper down the road", and proceed to inform him that as he didn't buy from us, we're not obligated to do warranty repairs - the cost is $x per hour plus parts.
well, he was not impressed. going on about how we should stand behind the products we sell, and blah-blah consumer rights, blah-blah trade practices, blah-blah-blah.
when he ran out of steam I calmly told him that he bought is at and they are the ones with his warranty.
he then goes off about having to waste time and fuel to drive there and back, and then again to pick it up.
I responded with something like "that $50 saving is not looking so hot now, is it?"
as before, he was not best pleased and left.
tl;dr - if you want local support, support the locals
floutsch@reddit
It never surprises me when people act that way - we're just too many not to have weird outliers. But saying it that blatantly makes me wonder if those people have any consideration for others.
hydrogen18@reddit
I was 12 when I charged a lawyer $20 to flip a switch once to fix his computer.
I'm still unsure if my dad was proud or what whenever I told him the bill
drunken-acolyte@reddit
$15 call out, $5 labour. Lawyer probably knew a pro would charge him more than double. I think everyone won that day.
Ha-Funny-Boy@reddit
A physician friend called me one day asking if I would come to his office because he was having a problem with his office computer. I did. It was a simple 10 minute fix. He wanted to pay me. I reminded him that he had done things for me and not charged me.
A couple of months later he gave me a coin for my collection. I tried to tell him he really didn't have to give it to me, I would buy it. He said, "It's my money, I can do with it what I want," so I accepted. The coin is worth $350US. I still have it.
17HappyWombats@reddit
It's also a lesson more likely to stick if the customer has to open their wallet.
rcp9ty@reddit
I once showed a former boss at the time who was a civil engineer with licenses to sign off on drawings in every state in the United States ( all have their own test ) along with some licenses in his home country outside the USA. How to turn on the wifi switch on his laptop ) He apologized to me for wasting my time and I replied you pay me to be here how I spend my time is completely up to you. What I think is funny I struggled in engineering school and left to study computers.
hydrogen18@reddit
The dude had a PE in all 50 states? I have known a few guys who had PE for their specific field (automotive, aerospace, etc.) but wow.
rcp9ty@reddit
Yep we had a couple engineers pull it off at that firm. The leadership team used it as sort of a pissing match like who could get the most states and then whoever reached all 50 could be a regional manager or office manager. They'd all start with the states we had offices in then they'd branch out to other states. One manager took the pe tests in Canada and passed all but one section of Canada without studying only to study for a week before he took it a second time and passed.
hydrogen18@reddit
that seems almost completely overkill. How much engineering work is there in for example Montana? The state is basically uninhabited
rcp9ty@reddit
A civil engineer is capable of doing everything from roads, to buildings to curtain wall to storm water management and houses and all of those things require a pe signature. If most firm don't have Montana and we do then we could bill a client whatever that engineers hourly rate was to look over and sign off on a plan set. That engineer in particular had a billable rate of $240 an hour signing one plan set in the entire career would pay for the test. Most of the stuff is the same on each test and engineers had binders full of notes about weird rules about each state and we had engineers in all fields so they could ask different departments to explain rules in details. We also did plan set reviews for other firms as well so if a local engineering firm needed a second pair of eyes to look at something after they designed it we could audit the work.
zaro3785@reddit
Did she just not realise how much tech support cost? Especially for in-home service
l008com@reddit (OP)
Who knows what could possibly have been going through her head. I had zero interest in trying to find out.
NotYourNanny@reddit
She spent a lot of time and effort learning to be an nurse, which is a difficult and miserable at times job. Ergo, she deserves to make more than lesser beings, which includes any job she doesn't understand.
It's a common enough attitude.
rcp9ty@reddit
My cousin is a nurse. She always apologizes to me for not knowing the simple stuff. I look at her and say the same thing. There's plenty of simple stuff she knows how to do from her years of being a nurse. The best is medicine interactions. A doctor and a physician's assistant and a psychiatrist can all give you prescription drugs but it's a nurses job to make sure your drugs play nice with each other. I'm more than happy to spend a couple hours every couple of months to help her if it means I can ask her for her skillset later on. I'm always happy to barter skills.
AmbassadorSerious450@reddit
This is completely unhinged. I can't imagine how she expected it to go.
l008com@reddit (OP)
The crazy thing is how normal and reasonable she was on the first phone call, and how that magically turned into angry and crazy in the followup voicemail. We talked for a long time and she was totally normal.
Senkyou@reddit
I wonder if it was some convoluted attempt at being a strong negotiator or she saw it similarly to how she saw car sales or something like that.
l008com@reddit (OP)
She seemed angry in the voicemail, like she was offended I charged "so much". Btw my rates have always been extremely competitive, then and now.
Mr_ToDo@reddit
And let's be honest the business is charging $65 an hour, that price is for more than just you. If nothing else and you were just you working out of your house and didn't have tools to pay for you'd still have to cover for the dead times.
Working for someone else I know I'm certainly not getting our shop rate(although I also know my pay doesn't scale with it when it goes up either which is a whole other thing, grrr)
On a totally different note I once saw someone argue without any hint of awareness on how stupid it was that customers shouldn't have to pay for a businesses overhead because it was "their problem". I honestly don't know how they thought things should be priced or how places would pay for the things that go into their work but it was just one of the dumbest things I ever heard.
Black_Handkerchief@reddit
That reminds me of me doing some laptop help around that same period for an older lady acquaintance of my neighbors at the time. I was like 'no worries, I'll check it out, and if it's just a quick fix like last time, the cup of tea she prepares will be more than enough' in the way that such things tend to go.
This lady had the slowest, underspecced piece-of-shit laptop I've ever experienced with some heavy-handed antivirus on top of it that had failed to block whatever was screwing things up. I get that people buy cheap, but damn, that thing turned 3 second actions into 10 minute actions, and I spent far too much time there.
She was extremely displeased with me taking a long time, but I had zero intentions of taking her device home with me because you never know when shitty hardware will break on you or people turn on you for god knows what and audibly complained about my taking my time even when I took the time to get out my own meh-specced laptop which wasn't as old, but was still a few years old at that point and similarly required a bit of love to keep running smoothly, just to show her the comparison between how long it took my laptop to show the start menu versus hers and garner some understanding that I'm not trying to fleece her out of her time nor money. I even gave some advice in regards to upgrading or buying a replacement, pretty much telling her in nicer words that if you buy cheap, you get what you pay for. But the continuous little tuts and sighs of her displeasure of my (primarily waiting) effort were very obvious.
Keep in mind I was just a student at the time, and by the end, I was done with this lady. I asked a really low price like 20 or 30 euros because the matter had just soaked up like 5+ hours of my time while dealing with a very uncomfortable situation.
I hadn't even planned on charging her, but when she inquired 'what do I owe you?' at the end of it (perhaps expecting me to ask for nothing like the previous time I helped her out), I realized that 'no matter how much I like my neighbors, you and your bargain laptop have been too much of a pain for me to have done this for free', so I gave her a nice little number that I felt represented the complexity of the WORK done (and not the time itself, so it really was still cheap as hell) with some sort of friend-discount implied. If I didn't have to live with my neighbor who I liked really much for many more years, I'd have asked at least triple or quadruple that by charging for TIME alone. I'm pretty sure I had a gut-feeling she would not be happy about it, but she paid and off I went.
To nobody's surprise, she never asked for my help again, and when I explained the awkward parting to my neighbor next time we talked, he was like 'yeah we heard, but don't worry about it, we know she's a handful and you've never asked me for money, so it must have been really bad with her' and we're still friends to this day.
(For anyone who is about to suggest I shouldn't have done anything for (near-)free: a good relationship with ones neighbor is priceless, and this one especially had and has helped me plenty of times with issues that I struggled with, so I don't regret it. But starting with that incident, I made up a clear boundary for as far helping acquaintances and reimbursement for time went... but I suspect we all learn that lesson the hard way!)
Techn0ght@reddit
"I'll give you the $40/hr discount if you hire me on full time with benefits like you get. Sound good?"
persondude27@reddit
Well, she makes $40 / hr and can't solve it, so clearly the work is worth more than $40. Maybe even $60, or even $65 / hr!
tem1985@reddit
The boilermaker story is so easily applied to just about everything.
mercurygreen@reddit
My plumber makes more in an hour than I do, and I'm THANKFUL to pay him.
But nurses DO need to be paid more.
glenmarshall@reddit
I solved that problem by requiring a minimum number of hours payment for any work. How many hours I spent were often not relevant.
MadRocketScientist74@reddit
I'd love to see her try that argument with a lawyer or doctor.
It irks me when people devalue a persons time just because they don't believe that person put in the "work" to be worth it.
I used to do IT and people were shocked at my hourly rate for personal support. Like, dude, I can fix your crap 5x faster than the PFY down the block, and you have no idea how many hours I spend every week reading documentation and trying things out when I am not getting paid, just to be worth that hourly rate.
NotYourNanny@reddit
As the old joke goes:
A plumber fixes a damaged pipe in a doctor's house and asks for 200 dollars. Doctor says to him: "Even i, don't make so much money in such a short period and i'm a doctor".
And the plumber goes: "I know sir. I used to be a doctor myself"
JamesWjRose@reddit
I don't care how much a client makes, I do not negotiate down. I have however raised my rate when a client tried to go lower, the Asshole Tax
ol-gormsby@reddit
I ran across one of those. Asked me questions for 10 minutes then asked my rate.
"$95 for the callout, that gets you the first hour, then half that for every 30 minutes or part thereof after the first hour"
........ "I thought you were about $40/hour"
I've never charged that.
him .......
me .......
Also, I had one guy keep me on the phone asking questions for about 20 minutes asking all about windows networking and setting up a small office. I eventually said that I'd have to charge him for further questions. Never heard someone hang up so quickly. Of course, he only asked surface-level questions, I doubt he ever got it set up.